Change forum notification settings
Currently the Zotero forums seem to send an email notification for a first new post into a thread after I have last visited the thread. This can be problematic.
Consider the following case:
-User A posts a question
-User B posts a response saying that what User A wants to do is not possible
-User B posts a follow up about a workaround that would actually be useful for User A.
Now from the perspective, from User A, he has asked a question and has received an email containing a message that his problem cannot be solved. There is little reason for him to visit the forum again, so he misses the useful workaround presented in a follow-up post.
Consider the following case:
-User A posts a question
-User B posts a response saying that what User A wants to do is not possible
-User B posts a follow up about a workaround that would actually be useful for User A.
Now from the perspective, from User A, he has asked a question and has received an email containing a message that his problem cannot be solved. There is little reason for him to visit the forum again, so he misses the useful workaround presented in a follow-up post.
I think it would be fine to just append a note to the notification message:
"You won't receive further notifications until the next time you visit the forums. Check back for further updates, or click the link above to ensure that you receive a notification the next time a message is posted."
I don't think we'd add an extra user setting here. Probably if you subscribed to the whole forums or a category that would just override the discussion subscription and revert you to the current behavior, so existing power users wouldn't be affected.
I think making subscriptions to threads for all messages would be good and viable.
edit: I mean viable wrt the amount of e-mail. Obviously can't speak to technical viability.
I can see how this system _may_ work for single threads, where you might come back to reply to a response someone posted on your thread, but as mronkko pointed out, it's not ideal.
As far as large amount of traffic is concerned, a lot of forums offer daily emails but leave that option up to the user.
I realize that this is probably not a trivial fix, so I don't expect it to change... soon at least.
The concern is about casual users who don't know how to follow feeds, which is why we're talking about changing the per-thread notification (which defaults to on after you post). Thinking about that more, if we did change it to send on every post I think it would have to offer a link in the notification message to unsubscribe from notifications for the thread. Otherwise if someone posted a one-time question to, say, the ZotFile thread, they'd continue to get dozens more messages, get annoyed, and probably mark the message as spam, which is bad for us.
In any case, if this was going to happen it'd likely fall on fcheslack to implement it. It's possible there are other notification plugins with more options for Vanilla 2.
FYI, RSS2 and ATOM feed links only show up for the General category. All the other categories are missing those links, though changing the "Categories=General" to whatever you want does work.
FWIW, I found several options under Forum Account Settings that look promising: https://forums.zotero.org/account/ Account Options > Notification